Good Sex Illustrated (9 page)
The doctors will be proud of how liberal they are: they’ve dared to talk about erections, desire, intercourse, contraception to people less than fourteen years old. Yes, but that daring gesture— which waited for authorization from the State before expressing itself—is a chance for them to spread the most narrow-minded sexual morality, the most hackneyed commonplaces of petit-bourgeois coitus (desire like an “appetite” and that “is a part of love,” the “tenderness” that Dad is going to prove to Mom, the “cuddling” that he slips her to announce that he wants to get off). They even add that you “don’t just” make nookie to procreate, but they reserve that pleasure for the big people and pass quickly to something else (“And animals?”); and they certainly don’t admit that men and women fuck in perpetual fear—and not “with the hope”—of having a child. They celebrate pleasure without restrictions provided that these only depict conjugal pleasures (fucking “Mom”) and reject those that make up the entire sexuality of the child and the disinterested pleasures of the adult.
You have to be a cynic and profoundly dishonest to call “innocence” (as religious zealots say) or “polymorphous perversion” (as psychoanalysts say) the dissymmetry that exists between the child’s sexuality and that of the adult who has been brought to heel. The latter is conceptualized, hypercoded, socialized and sermonized in excess, thinks about itself, is of two minds, assesses itself, polices itself, weighs and counts its expenditures, its roles, its appearances, its winnings and its assets. A child’s desire doesn’t conform to such parochial management; multiple and nameless, running everywhere, searching for everything, kissing everything, open and shut, grasping and wasteful, selfish and infinitely generous, all he can see in adult sexuality is an exotic, grim, incomprehensible and vaguely unsavory fable, like the entireworld of parents—its thrift, etiquettes, prisons, borders, sexual and affective baseness.
But the child smothered by these corporal prohibitions, crushed by parental models, repudiated even in his desire (you want to come? eat some cake, at your age it’s the same thing), forced to precociously reproduce the flaws, paralyses, mutilations of the adult world, is in a weak position: he’s someone permanently under siege who, except for a very uncommon stroke of fortune, forgets himself, surrenders, becomes lost and gives in to the strongest. This is the price of his survival. Suddenly he is helpless, asexual, non-desiring, impatient for us to teach him our miserable sexuality after having stubbed out the brilliance of his—a brilliance that isn’t part of being a “child” but the feature of every man, before the order brings him down. This is the defeated child that the doctors show us with satisfaction—passive, constricted flesh ready to flow into the mould that Dad and Mom cobbled together for him under the watchful eyes of the State.
Truth is fine, but the order is better: the former engenders freedoms that the latter condemns. It’s not difficult to imagine which side will win out. So we’ll tell children that they’re not mature enough physically to have a sex; and when they become physically mature we’ll tell them that they’re not yet psychically up to par. This is the way we pull a donkey along by a carrot until the age of about twenty, and sometimes more.
Sex information has been provided through the expedient of a family story so that family and sexuality seem ineluctably implied by each other. Sex education teaches that a family doesn’t come into the world with the help of the stork but between two bed sheets: and that’s what sex is for, and only for that. Even if it means that the parents have a right to a “premium on pleasure,” oncethey’ve accomplished their task as breeders. Similarly, the liberalization of morals and contraception will be a “premium on well-being” awarded every obedient home: they won’t be a way of freeing the individual from the sexual or social prisons in which the State wants him to hide himself away.
Thus, the little heroes of the two family books (7–9 years, 10–13 years) will have only one big question to ask: how babies are born. A concern that will be timidly overtaken by another in the second volume: how do adults have sex? On the other hand, the children will never ask: why don’t I have the right to touch my body and others’? Why am I shut up here? Why do you have sex and I don’t, although I can and want to? Why do you speak to me as if I were blind, powerless, an idiot? Why have you made so many little mysteries, and are you taking advantage of them now, to tell me what’s convenient for you and not the truth? Why show me these organs, these glands, these innards, these fetuses, and prevent me from freely seeing the outsides of bodies?
Such a list of contradictions could go on to infinity. Of course, as soon as Dad and Mom have to clear up the mysteries that their own censure has created, they rush around with the task of making them seem completely natural, innocent and nameable without defying morality. But if this is the case, why are morals so rigid that another vocabulary would be in defiance of them? Why are parents, doctors, educators in league to prevent the child from experiencing what they claim to be teaching him? Why this absolute silence before this mountain of “revelations”? Why these pregnancies and these deliveries, images as painful for the child as they are for the adult (even women don’t get to see their own delivery from this perspective, it’s a sight reserved for the attending physician)? Why these lies by omission whenever “nature” offends morality? Whyare these caresses and this desire recalled so obscurely whereas desire and caresses are what have bound the child to his family circle since the time he was born?
No answer for that. But we understand that the book is portraying questioners between the ages of 9 and 11: their excessive naivete will stay almost unnoticed, and they won’t ask any more about it than can be said. The older readers or less inane ones will have to restrict themselves to the same limits. If they think they’re swindled, infantilized, ignored by the work, “Jean and Sylvie” will prove to them that they’re wrong. The doctors are building an official model of the child 10–13, a falsified model but one that supports the authority of scientific knowledge and that is approved by the parents. The real children will know what they must be like sexually to be accepted. Each reader in his own corner, with his bizarre excess of sexuality in relationship to the model, will think he’s unique, exceptional, vaguely abnormal, and will stifle his desire. He won’t know that most children have the same “anomaly” and that the wonderful child-of-the-doctors is either a victim or an imposter. He’ll suffer from his frustration and feel the desires that cause it: he’ll fight them, conceal them, admit them timorously to get help, or he’ll satisfy them shamefully. Such mortification was invented by Christianity; medicine takes it over, and the order goes on.
The eroticism experienced by the child, which the book silences or defiles, will be permanently linked with guilt: now, all sex is bad, except within family nuptials, which alone have been absolved by medicine.
We’ll never be afraid of ourselves, later on?
ask the two simpletons at the end of the manual.
For one thing, you won’t be ashamed of your body, and you wont be afraid of being punished for sexual desires,
answer the parents, who had first remarked:
too many people aren’t aware of how their whole body functions, sohow could they be balanced?
We can marvel at the fact that humanity was able to live for such a long time, to prosper, reproduce, invent, rule, be cheerful sometimes, when there was no sexology to teach it the right path to happiness. It’s true that our ancestors were “unbalanced”: they fucked in every kind of position, wore their hair long, hardly ever washed except for pleasure, felt each other up, fornicated without hiding it, sucked and ass-fucked each other, walked on bellies to cause abortion, had orgasms far and wide, without consideration for age or sex—as is attested by today’s sciences concerning prehistory, antiquity, primitive cultures and, indirectly, animal biology itself. Nature’s aberrations, which bourgeois society has rectified: years ago, the Puritans of America demanded that domestic animals—dogs or horses—wear boxer shorts in public to hide their private parts; and modern medicine, for its part, finally possesses the secret of sexual balance. It’s in knowing what it knows (a necessity that no one contests, even though no one thinks it’s enough); but also, and especially, in believing what it believes, doing what it says, hating what it condemns, deciphering ovaries and balls like it does, where the moral Law of this little half-century in a little country of the West is miraculously found written. If knowing “how the body functions” is all we need to be “balanced,” it’s because sexology, more fortunate than Claude Bernard looking for the soul under his scalpel, has discovered, by means of dissections, the basis of good morals: and obeying them is the requirement of that balance. The text of the
Encyclopedia
is clear, explicit and implacable when it comes to that. What represents crime or delinquency for middle class laws, scandal for middle class morality, sin for middle class religion, is deviance, imbalance and disease for objective medicine and has no politics for the bourgeoisie in power.
Its useless to fight for sexual freedom: liberty is virtue. Modern children will no longer be “ashamed of their bodies” (were they ever, unless it was taught by their parents?): we’ve merely made them ashamed of the bodies of others. They won’t be afraid of being “punished for sexual desires”—in so much as no law is punishing them, really: only pleasures are punished. Pleasures of the child, of every minor, of the unmarried, of women who no longer want to be slaves, and of perverts; in short, around three quarters of humanity. And fine people have a way of tormenting and excluding—in a way that is more ruthless than any executioner, any exile—those delinquents whom contemporary Justice is lenient enough to absolve. This moral lynching is even the most ordinary kind of sensuality about which the mild-mannered morons of our land agree.
Obviously, the guilt-mongering of pleasure will no longer be enough to hold back the teenager; but underlying his disorders, well anchored in his desire, which is becoming blatant as it lives its last hours, it will leave its mark upon the long, hard and grueling adult age to follow, during which all the lessons of childhood will reawaken one by one and lock the fellow in the dungeon built for him. It’s like an order slow on the uptake, or a poison whose greatest effect is produced a very long time after it’s been administered, even if you’ve forgotten all about receiving it a long time ago.
In the meantime, it will have been invaluable for preadolescents to remain subjugated to the world of the “little ones”—just like they remained among the Mothers before, until the moment when their development became too obvious and the society of the Fathers took charge of them.
Here is the only description of the act of love meant for those less than fourteen. Its altogether worthy of those photos I reproduced, with the two sulking wet blankets used to glorify conjugal love:
“Look at the photo,” says Dad. “The man lies on top of the woman. He puts his penis in her vagina. It’s easy because the vagina has become very moist and his member slips inside instinctively. Their two bodies become no more than one. The pleasure that both of them are feeling becomes so strong that the man has an ejaculation. This is known as orgasm.
“Do you have to move? I mean is it enough just to stick your penis in?” says an attentive Jean.
“The man and the woman find a movement together—one that’s in tune with their bodies. They kiss ‘on the mouth,’ too, like you’ve already seen in films.”
“With their mouths open? Touching tongues?”
“Yes.”
“And afterward? If the penis runs out of sperm, does it become limp again?” says Jean.
“Yes. Desire stops exciting it after a certain time. The man and the woman are happy, calm, relaxed. They feel wonderfully peaceful together.”
Must I, yet again, insist on the fact that this “scientific” description of a “natural” act is actually the announcement of a Puritan protocol for coitus, bowdlerized and socially coded to the teeth? The man “lies on top of the woman,” “easy” and “instinctive” penetration, desire that “excites the penis” if the latter “has some sperm,” a couple that now forms only one body, and this final irony: all these lurches to produce… the man’s ejaculation. No female orgasm? No, Mom silently plays the mattress and appreciates “orgasm” behind the scenes.
It’s the sperm that runs the show,
as Jean says in another place.
Mysterious rite from an unknown land, coitus as an instinctual machine during which one “has” an ejaculation. The pro-birth,paternalist and puritan stereotype seems so estranged from the human body that you’re no longer even certain that it’s participating in the affair:
Do you have to move?
asks Jean, who has probably never churned his loins against his sheets, rubbed his stomach against a friend or his sister while he was pretending to fight, or wanked his butt against the seat of his bike while playing the champion.
This great moment of “instinct” is a restrictive socio-cultural model that dad-mom hands down, a recipe for good sex that allows you to pull through at the least expense. What is it “enough” to do in order for it to function? Disappointment: no matter how much you take the right position, close your eyes, kiss like in the movies, squeeze your buttocks together like at church, imitate your parents, put your cock in the “moist” oven, and wait for it to heat up “so strong” that it overflows, nothing happens; you “have” to see to it, the “instinctive” mechanism is imperfect, you must—horror or horrors—be there.
Fortunately, the fact that they’re two of you gives you the guts, you get rid of the blunders, you “find together” the movement that makes it easier and quickly produces the mini-frenzy, the little binge, the little death in which the mind, overtaxed by the obscenities that you inflict upon it, finally gives up ground—after having verified that everything took place as prescribed and that you didn’t mistake the hole, the position, the role or the gestures. Consciousness resurfaces once the danger is past, during the time of feeling “wonderfully peaceful” that follows that vile abuse that Nature commands us to do and from which Nature claims its fine fruits. A duty, in truth, that would exceed the force of morality for normal citizens if this model of decent coitus didn’t exist—wasn’t universally taught, if not practiced, since there has been a Christian god—and didn’t atleast put the worst stains of the “sexual relationship” under cover. Obviously, it’s always easy to put the blame on Nature’s back, and that very sad beast with two backs plays a bit part.